Paris hosts major climate summit without Donald Trump

Paris hosts major climate summit without Donald Trump

World leaders and investors have announced more than one billion dollars (£750 million) in investments to make it easier for countries and industries to give up oil and coal.

French President Emmanuel Macron used the summit to seize the global spotlight, capitalising on US President Donald Trump’s isolationist policies and German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s domestic weakness to position himself as the world’s moral compass on climate change.

After opening the summit on a pessimistic note, Mr Macron was more encouraging at the closing, praising the “very concrete” commitments made by the participants.

“We started today to make up some ground in this battlefield,” he said in his closing speech.

Today’s commitments will be able to be tracked and verified on a dedicated platform, he added.

Bill Gates, Sir Richard Branson and other energy executives and investment fund leaders announced a dozen international projects emerging from the summit that will inject money into efforts to curb climate change.

World Bank president Jim Yong Kim won rousing applause when he announced that his agency would stop financing oil and gas projects in two years.

The summit, co-hosted by the UN, the World Bank and Mr Macron, was held on the second anniversary of the Paris climate accord, which was ratified by 170 countries.

More than 50 heads of state and government took part. Mr Trump was not invited, but he was ubiquitous.

One by one, officials including former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, billionaire Michael Bloomberg and former US secretary of state John Kerry insisted the world will shift to cleaner fuels and reduce emissions regardless of whether the Trump administration pitches in.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, left, speaks with European Commissioner for Energy Union Maros Sefcovic at the One Planet Summit (Christophe Ena/AP)

Central to the summit was countering Mr Trump’s main argument that the 2015 Paris accord on reducing global emissions would hurt US business.

Mr Macron, a 39-year-old former investment banker, argues that the big businesses and successful economies of the future will be making and using renewable energy instead of oil.

The projects announced on Tuesday include a programme for eight US states to develop electric vehicles, an investment fund for the hurricane-hit Caribbean and money from Mr Gates’s foundation to help farmers adapt to climate change and develop low-carbon technology.

The projects also aim to speed up the end of the combustion engine to reduce the emissions that contribute to global warming.

Activists kept up pressure with protests – including one on a bridge at the summit venue, an island in the Seine River – calling for companies and governments to stop investing in oil and coal now.

Top officials agreed with them, saying the global financial system is not shifting fast enough away from carbon emissions and towards renewable energy and business projects.

“Financial pledges need to flow faster through a more streamlined system and make a difference on the ground,” said Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, whose island nation is among those on the front lines of the rising sea levels and extreme storms worsened by human-made emissions.

“We are all in the same canoe,” rich countries and poor, he said.

Emmanuel Macron hosted the summit (Philippe Wojazer/AP)

Japanese foreign minister Taro Kono described ways his country is investing in climate monitoring technology and hydrogen energy, but he said: “We have to do more and better.”

Mr Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, said environmentalists owed Mr Trump a debt of “gratitude” for acting as a “rallying cry” for action on climate change.

He said the private sector coalition called America’s Pledge, which promises to honour the climate goals set in 2015, “now represents half of the US economy”.

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